autumn 2021

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See the site home page for the current update.

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An insightful but misleading newspaper article on Heidegger’s Being and Time caused me to comment at length, “engaged being,” for readers who aren’t familiar with Heidegger’s thinking.

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Dec. 11 | Lots of new discussions are coming online in January onward. I’ve said something similar to that before (more than once), only because I push back my sense of immanent milestone thanks to the fruitfulness of current work.

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Nov. 26 | The ultimacy of the universe will be forever unknown. So, the ultimate point of Our form of life is ours to design, making time worthwhile, at best cultivating humanity lastingly.

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engaged being

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I came across an insightful article on Heidegger in a mainstream newspaper, written by a senior journalist, which caused me to comment at length. Afterward, I realized that some of that could be useful here for readers who are not familiar with Heidegger’s thinking.

The journalist mentioned Heidegger’s notion of “being in the world,” which occasioned my comment that “indeed, proactive engagement with one’s world is vital.” I didn’t elaborate, but here is a chance for an elaboration which may be surprising:

Heidegger was not referring to a state of affairs: be-ing in the world. He was referring to an activist engagement—equivalent to what French Existentialists later meant by “engagé.” “In-der-Welt-Sein” is meant by Heidegger as we literally read it: in-the-world-being. The German phrase for “being in the world” is different: “auf der Welt sein.”

That kind of difference—structural versus engaged—was implicitly expressed by my further comment at the journalist’s article (comment which unfortunately showed my apostrophes and dashes as errors):

Heidegger sought to open up others’ thinking for the sake of new ways of approaching unprecedented times authentically and lastingly.

for your consideration, among considerations

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It’s common in philosophy to prefix assertions with “It is the case that…X.” What’s done by that, you know, is to contend an assertion (or argument) as tenable.

Are you already feeling averse to such consideration? Bear with me five short paragraphs, then things get interesting.

Inasmuch as anyone comes to that relative to their own stage of development, going forward with actual argument proximally depends on the other’s sense of the claim. That would pertain to two persons face-to-face.

countering elitism

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While pursuing a tangent on elitism (that I’m against, of course) which is a problem for many persons (often as “anti-intellectualism”), I came across two passages that I deleted eight years ago from a posting on “Philosophy for good” (2013), which was “to be continued,” but wasn’t. I wanted to later discuss working “without ethnocentrism, elitism, super-naturalism, metaphysicalism, or deontic overbearingness.”

I also wrote (but deleted) that

Philosophy is often regarded in academia these days as expendable for other specialties (and “philosophy“ is often a shallow pastime in mass media). But no other domain is better able to advance important issues between and across other domains or/and to emplace life-centered thinking into large scale horizons fruitfully.

summer 2021

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From journalism to phenomenology, life is as is.

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August 26 | “On ‘belief’” would be better titled “beyond belief” because it’s briefly about belief’s relation to knowing, action, and rationality. I don’t focus there on belief, but my intent remains. I do have a discussion to share soon.

Vistas in molecular engineering: “‘Inescapable’ COVID-19 Antibody Discovery: Neutralizes All Known SARS-CoV-2 Strains.” This is truly exciting. Notice in the article the technological means of gaining the results. Sooner than one might imagine, there will be no disease....

It is as: given as is

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from journalism to phenomenology

Professional journalism (distinct from promotional writing, disguised as “journalism”) has a default stance toward topic T that is “reportedly T” or “allegedly, T…” or, implicitly, “the story goes” or “It’s said that…” or “They say.” (Of course, a reliable source may simply assert what is the case, evincing trust by reputation.)

Representing what claims to be valid is separate from establishing the validity of it. Ordinarily, the two aren’t distinguished by a subject of reporting because the speaker/writer postures itself as trustworthy. Ordinary life postures itself as validly present.

But astute journalism frames the presumably frameless as being under question about its pretense of transparency. A subject of reporting may be playing a confidence game of “guileless” duplicity. “Who, me?”

a point of flexible perspectivity

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Here are two ways—two allegories, two metaphoricities—to express where
I’ve been and I am in The Open:

1: I’ve finished the design of the house, but I don’t want to take time to see it built (which would clearly show you how I’ve been: designing the house) before developing another design.

I’m a builder, too, but architecture is far more appealing.

Well, could I at least share the blueprint drawings of the façade?
Yes, but that wouldn’t express the point of the house as result of
a generative process. The blueprint doesn’t represent the Work
which has the ostensible result.

Indeed, the house is a design of generativity—in a sense: a meta-house, a conceptual dwelling, whose architexture shows only by living through it—which wouldn’t be to recapitulate its genesis; rather, to live through an appropriation of the house with you.

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spring 2021

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I’m working with my notes 10 to 14 hours daily, believing I have a realistic sense of the distance to a horizon (goal)—“new postings regularly, beginning in a week or so,” he says, below—and I’m usually wrong.

However, I’ve gotten to a culminative point that the coming week will clarify (offline). I’m stoked (as we used to say), exuberant. I wish I don’t need sleep. (Maybe the E.T.s, sending unidentifiable aerial phenomena around, can pursue their fun 24/7.)

winter 2021

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I have 18 non-political topics I want to discuss intently (i.e., not casually) soon—over the next month or so—but I need a few more days before beginning here. Those 18 will form a constellational set that is to be the first and longest part of nine (seven shorter ones and another long one). I hope to begin putting new items online next week. | March 3: The first of the 18 is available, “personhood…,” and the other 17 are consolidated for detailing and sharing; but I’m unsure when I’ll give time to those (and the other eight) because I want to wander back into more-creative writing.

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a vote for notes of fairness

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Someone who is interested in the notion of public sphere these days caused me
to reply with some references and comment that I want to share, but expand.

Coincidently, New York Times journalist Thomas Edsall has this week re-raised issues of free speech with legal scholars in view of the authoritarian behavior of Trump (nothing new!—but now more dangerous than ever) and in view of the free reign of right-wing opinion in “viral” social spaces.

That dramatizes how philosophy of law is not basically about academic dispute. It’s about how we make and keep society good, humane, and, to my mind—and to Habermas, surely—make and keep society pragmatically progressive, which is also to say progressively pragmatic.

And that’s not mere academicism. What we are to do pertains to the scale of relevance that is each person’s daily life: being well, always being open to learning fundamentally new ways of thinking, and promoting community.